designer and worked in the area for many years. we are all trying to understand why we have been omitted or severely restricted as occupancy type in the new sally zoning laws? >> new to the 3 4 f1area and 1

us have come to this area because we can walk to this area and there are business and is ago lighting designer in the area that we are working with right now on a lighting project. so there is a few other things that we have written down that i just wanted to point out there is about 60 design professionals in the western sonoma area and about 40 within the valley area and so we would like to stay, continue and continue to grow our businesses there. good afternoon commissioners my name is jeffery miller with miller company architect i want to follow up on the previous speaker i have a business that has been there for 50 years and in my building

there are several interior designers and lighting designers my wife is a designer who has a space had the building as well. we actually share facilities copy machines and thing like that, that we cross fertilize, it seems that we are part of the creative density of the area and having designers, landscape architects and argument connects architects and interior poem shrewded from the area i do not understand that. i have been to several meetings and i support the plan in general but it's just in this particular matter, i do not support the purpose in that. >> is there any additional public comment? okay seeing none of the public comment it's closed and opening

up to commissioners commissioner sag guya. i think the process has been really great and a lot of people have said it's a model for community planning the planner who work rkd worked with mr. meek cowas sequentially assigned to the japan project and required after that and brought a lot of ideas that were brought from the western sonoma and the general concept was generated in western gnome and when ia and that is being taken from the western japan plan. so a lot of things are being taken out of it and i'm not ready today to start a lot with particular details in the plan and i think we should pooive it forward with changes suggested by staff. let he just address one and then i'll shut-up for a while and that is an historic

resource. i have been in historic preservation business for over 30 years, my company is a historic preservation form ark tell the court tubally and as well as doing study and is i was on the lan mark preservation advisory advisory board in the late 80s's and so therefore it dame as a surprise that there was so much interest and i was glad there for a while that people showed so much interest in preserving the historic buildings in the historic sonoma area and i looked at the restriction and saw hmm it's only article ten land marks and as it was pointed out by multiattitude of people i thought well that is a bit restrictive given what was adopted in earn neighborhoods.

eastern neighborhoods and then it dawned autonomy that because the way that sonoma is create in alternatives of zoning the folks figured out there were other relaxed uses for historic resources. and then i thought this is just an end around to try to destroy mr. meek co's plan. and as devoted as i am to historic preservation and historic resource i can't bring myself to make recommendations that will essentially doom end around the hard work that has been put into this plan and to which so much time and resource have been devoted. so i'm willing to, i think, i'm the only commissioner up here that is talking about this now, but my recommendation would be to follow staff's option number

three, which basically would include article ten landmark's only, article 11 categorize one through four, and individually listed national register and california register properties it would expleu any property identified in a survey as being eligible for the california national registers and it would expleuld contributing properties in historic districts. >> commissioner can you file a different perspective but i think one speaker said something that was very important and it is that the basis of the lan is to do to harm and i do not want to see us snatch defeet from the jaws of victory, i think they have done a lot of good thing on this plan and we have seen a lot of good things happening south

of the market area in the last few years mostly because it has become an area that has been defact toe, other use have been coming in there and in fact i'll mention as we go on in my remarks that if you go through a lot of these places that were not zoned for office in fact, they probably are having office in there now, and it's one of the reasons why the district is improving as much as it is. the other thing that is really difficult for me, is when we did eastern neighbors we had long discussions about what is pd r? what is qualifies i have never heard too much about does ash tech tour qualify does land escaping qualify does interior decorating qualify these are things in the district if he do that is fine but we have not discussed that very much. also,

everybody has been talking about the process and i think it has been a great process, a lot of people did a lot of work but it's quite possible that many people are not aware of the process going on. in fact, we heard from stakeholders in the area that are coming up with certain things that are just being mentioned for the first time now, and probably the general public has very little knowledge of this process accept what they may have seen in the newspapers and for example what they have seen in the newspapers and i'm just learning about the overlay and this is the first day that we are suppose to approve it and i'm not sure what we are suppose do on this and i'm need more information on that kind of hinge and it may have been in the paper work somewhere but i didn't see it and i'm also seeing some kind of trailing legislation that the superiors are putting in to meter the amount of market rate

housing that you can have and that is also troubling to me and so i want to know more about that but let me give you my filings about a number of these things. the options that we had before us, were aums in regards to the zoning for the 16th 11th street corridor and i think most of the commissioners would agree to allow entertainment but not allow new residential, i think it does allow office. that does make a lot of sense, but i would also want to see grandfathering in of the project 340, lenth street and 601 (ben and when is a grandfathering date may be mr. particular can answer me is there a need to have a date or are there other projects that could qualify under this if we were to allow it, if you were.

if you were to develop the pro vision, you could craft it to be on whatever it is based on a specific date or prior to the adoption of the effective date you have flexibility with what kind of grandfathering grandfathering grandfathering pro vision you would create. >> yeah, i think we have to fair to the side of making it later on because there are a lot of new things that people are discovering as we go along and as i emergenced many of the uses that are now in areas are not necessarily industrial. i visited the mc kuai court a cue few nights ago and this is a court of a of night's story and it's going to be zone pd r or you know, whatever the sally i forgot whatever that stands for

but it would be industrial uses services, arts and yeah ... and most of the this court much of it residential. much of it would be considered office. i think macro media is there, i think there is an architect there there are on two pd r uses on the whole court and so i'm not saying that this has to be carved out but what i'm saying is that we have to look clarifyingingly at those thing and if there are a lot of undefining use that are going on now that we talk about legitimatization and if you have got uses that were possibly none conformling now and they will definitely be none conforming after the new zoning is pasted i think you shouldn't say we are shutting it down because we are rezoning it they are quiz they have go through a legalization

process to continue with their thing and that is something that i would very much like to see. a few other questions a roads. arose. sock talking about the central cor dour, i feel lean towards strong language that talks about strong ladies and gentlemen objective one .5 that makes it clear that this area is going to be reconstructed; probably sunsetting or delaying the pro visions because it doesn't make sense to zone it one-way and then three years later and if someone did actually jump in will and i don't think someone foolish enough to build the zoning if it increased but it they were to go and build a business and a couple of years later there was an inlay and there was a fight between the present biz owner and the perspective developer who may be coming in with a new

use. so something along those lines. either -- i don't know about carving it owvment that might be a little more extreme but certainly something that sun sets are -- known as the eligibility for existing historic buildings. i think that we should do at least what is done in the rest of the east eastern neighborhoods i think it's odd that we do anything different than what can he did in the rest and we have these stay surveys that we did earlier and identified quite-few expropt highly% of them were eligible for national and state registry and if they are, it's quite possible that because we have a strong historic preservation

commission and we are errorring to the side of preserving things we can have property owners in a catch 22 where they are in a zoning but they are not able to demolish the building or do anything that allows that zoning categorize and so i think you need to have as much flexibility as you can to allow them to develop office or possibly even housing but i think the real rub is between industrial use and office, i think we have to have some flexibility there and we could somewhat ameliorate that by limiting the office to 55,000 square feet and make sure that these buildings are not overwhelmed and forb other uses within the buildings or we deal with smaller buildings. then we need to talk about the increase

in inclusion area and this is no news to me and i do not really i know what the legislation says or what the ballot measure says and what it says is we are going to pass all of these things, the voters said but one of the pro vision is that you cannot add to the inclusionary amount and one of the pro vision allows the square footage by 20% or more where the gross housing amount of housing then you could increase the amount of inclusionary and i think this is coming at the 11th hour and i think basically what is it prevene lent in the rest of the eastern neighborhoods is is the city wide it is standard is what we should do here and the central corridor. one of the thing that everybody talks about in the western gnome april plan

plan is to keep the form of the buildings standard a lot of the speakers part of the task force are saying we don't want to see rise high rises and huge buildings and the sonoma plan is to keep the basic form fairly standard. so those are my ideas so far. oh, yeah, a couple of other things: i think there was the child care in the residential enclaveses and i think that makes sense as long as it's not overwhelming. and the mixed use in the residential office and entertainment for the 11th street area which i think, i had dwelled on already and i

think that is probably what we should allow but not on the entertainment section of it. >> thank you. i would like to share some of my thoughts and i share my thoughts sort-of early and may be commissioners can help us get somewhere. i'm not sure where we will end up today and for the most part. i'm pleased with the items will that the staff brought back about standing issues and i'm happy with that but this plan does cause me to pause for a sect and it's a large plan it's close to 30 blocks and i think it is restrictive and as you heard from some of the bits owners here, it may -- my worry is that it stalls and limits creativity and innovation this san francisco is known for that innovation and the fact that we don't know what is around the

corner is appealing about san francisco and brings people here and so i'm worried that putting so many restriction in such a large area may lock it up in time for something that may be good to others and i'm not sure that that is ever really going to equity you are us years from now. my comments right now have nothing do with the effort of the staff or the task force, clearly, they have done a tremendous amount of work but it's also apparent to me and it has been in most of today that has been notified involved. and i know it's 100 -- it's difficult to capture 100% of the audience, this audience happens to be very remixed and so, i think it's even more difficult of a task to reach everybody. but there are still some opt there as we speak right now that didn't neither about this and so i want to sort this out early and i'm not sure where we are.

i want to hear what other commissioners have to say thank you. commissioner gold den done. >> i think all of us want to thank the tasks force and task force that they put into this and as we know from other plans and process there will never be 100% because everyone doesn't think the same or have the same needs in these process. i think we have identified a few thing that we want to address and i think that it's important in this period of do no harm in looking at those issues of existing use and is how those existing issues are treated to the extent that they were tread at some point when they were put there and that is some of the

issues around 11th street and some of the issues that have come up and so i have a few questions for staff and this is the first time this week that i understood that currently in western sonoma design professionals were called out in the planning code as a classification of professionals that could have an office in western sonoma is at that true. >> instructor: . >> it is that in the past, the one category as being -- in sonoma for the last you know 20 years is that there is a very narrow pro vision that says in the s or and s o i for the space of a design profession profile

that you are in 3,000 feed and above. that the -- office space. the issue is that it's a very narrow scope of office types so, that does not get used there may be a number of existing legal design professionals scattered throughout western sonoma. we are -- done in the past but may be didn't use that pro vision i have never seen it used at all because's from time to timive it's 3,000 feet or less and so technically that type of space cannot be permitted now in what is being proposed in this valley that proposition would go away and so again. the valley is not a seemly a pd r district but it

is seemly a pd r district does it makes it a concept and a lot of the buildings and historic building crops the pd r districts don't get those because they are created to protect that, those pd r uses and other similar uses. >> is there a perceived problem in continuing that pro vision and #1 and number two continuing that we have gotten letters from firms that are there and i don't know if may be under that pro vision, it seem like how would they be treated now with this plan added. right it's difficult for me to know how many people would use that and i don't know how to add that back into the sally. >> that was not a community that you were concerned about? it was discussed and it

was understood that pro vision was there but for sally and just like in housing in sally for now you can do housing but if it's affordable but even that it was made to no office, no housing period. >> so i think that if we -- it would be interesting because we have then we know from documents we get ever week in our packet that there are firms that basically seem to fit that requirement that are in this area and so i would want to be -- in talking about if there is a legitimatization process it would make sense that these kinds of business and is kind of use would be and that there would be some sort of use for that -- does that make sense?

otherwise, and that way, we get c's over whatever there is to get in that regard. regard. in the same question, we looked at the various historic expawption i guess i want to understand do we know what the existing uses are in the buildings that have been contemporary plated even in the broadest do we know if many of these buildings have offices in them or did have offices in them because for me it's not about adding new offices but about recognizing what is happening today and not doing any harm to that and not just nor necessarily thing that are not already there. >> to my knowledge, we don't have a land use database that matches our historic resource

database for buildings that have been stayed i don't believe that is part of the survey in the buildings and we don't have an up-to-date men venue database for this area we could theoretically make detriment nations about uses in certain buildings but we don't have anything across the board. >> i think which don't have a building by building land use survey of had area in terms of -- with the historic buildings there has been a lot of comparison made to the process in the neighborhood and there is a big difference here and i know the eastern neighborhoods block by block but we have a very large residential enclaves area that would be primarily the area effected by the flexibility but in my view it's sake saying that it's a zone lez terrible and by-the-way, you could put an office here and there is a

disconnect for me here from a standpoint and it's one thing to allow athleticability like the church that you recent lie approved on a than and -- i don't have the corner right but i think it's quite different to say, the entire district can be used for a purpose completely different than the zonings and that is the concern that we have about this particular idea. >> and that is the question that i'm asking there have been representation and buildings that fall within that joan who currently do operate and fall much this category and have offices there and you know, to the extent that we know that, that exists and because it which is allowed under the previous plexability, we should deal with that as a separate and distinct issue. i'm not talking about the redden clave along say ninth for example, there are a lot of buildings that are not residential in nature along the

ninth street quarter and along the gas station and all of that stuff so my question is do we know what some of the uses are in those sort-of buildings not even looking at the residential enclaveses because for me it's hard to decide which of the opings makes the most sense not understanding what uses are already in the buildings. because i'm not -- i'm not saying that i want to make a whole bunch of new office buildings, that is not my suggestion but my suggestion is at that some buildings are already functionings as offices and may go out of business because of the size and type of business they are. >> just to address one issue if we can get the overhead and in terms of knowing what the uses are and the buildings that may have used the pro vision so far we can do that easily because the pro visions so far in western sonoma you have to be an article ten designated building or an article 11

category one through four when isth which, is the one loan green and so the threshold right now is constrictive the only thing that we didn't clue is the category one through four which, is one property exprown more can change their categorize and we have pretty good information on those few lots the rest of the buildings that are potentiallily eligible or gathering levels of historic resource, we don't have -- we know there is a mix of uses out there we know there have been whether or not of uses that have gone it and legally there are a lot of uses that go in and sometimes they don't know or they just go in and so there is a large mix of uses in these buildings already but we cannot definitely say how these buildings are being used currently. we can only kind-of use examples from other project

that we have had in past where other projects have taken advantage of this pro vision in eastern gnoma and other neighborhoods. >> 90 problem is that i don't have enough information to understand based on the information that you have given and the options i have in mind and given from a what we have just heard four seems to me the better of the land use options but again, i need more information to determine because we don't know how some of these buildings are being used or the types of buildings that they are and so i guess that may be when you are looking at the survey in the historic preservation commission, that i can that is something that can be discussed or something. one thing just to point out and make this point again is that any existing office, use, legal in